


take care to bury all that you can (take care to leave a trace of a man)

by Acaeria



Category: Batman (Comics), Red Hood and the Outlaws (Comics), Red Hood/Arsenal (Comics)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Gen, RHaTO #48, in which i get very emotional about jason and duela's relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-25
Updated: 2020-08-25
Packaged: 2021-03-06 17:34:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26112718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Acaeria/pseuds/Acaeria
Summary: The Joker’s still breathing, right now. His daughter is not.
Relationships: Duela Dent & Jason Todd
Comments: 4
Kudos: 22





	take care to bury all that you can (take care to leave a trace of a man)

**Author's Note:**

> oh boy. so.
> 
> i have a LOT of feelings about jason and duela. this is. not all of them. but i read the new issue and it hit me like a TRUCK because i've been thinking a lot about them over the past couple of days and then!! dc brings back my girl and does THAT!! i'm just a bit of an emotional wreck rn and so this happened because there were. feelings. i needed to express.
> 
> i wrote this in a single frenzied sitting and haven't edited so please excuse typos and the like.
> 
> fic title from leave a trace by chvrches.

Jason holds Duela.

Jason holds Duela with a grip like iron, holds her like he did the last time he’d thought she’d been about to die in front of him, holds her close to his chest and sobs with dry eyes.

She’s gone, of course. She’d been gone before he got here. She is warm and stiff and still and he knows, he knows he needs to move, needs to get out of this burning building, needs to– needs to– needs to do  _ something– _

But he’s kneeling in rubble holding the corpse of the girl who called herself his sister and he’s fifteen years old and watching the numbers on a bomb tick down and he can hear sirens in the distance, or is that laughter,  _ His _ laughter, ricocheting through the sordid streets of a city Jason has cursed over and over and yet still cannot escape from?

He doesn’t know. All he knows is Duela is dead and– it’s  _ his _ fault, isn’t it? The Joker’s new sidekicks, whoever they were, wouldn’t have done this if not for  _ him _ . If not for Jason. If Jason hadn’t gone off and gotten himself killed all those years ago, the Joker wouldn’t have attempted to recreate it with a girl who didn’t deserve it. A girl who was too much like Jason for her own good, a girl who was sick and hurting and so, so young, and just needed someone to save her.

Jason had needed saving, too, back then.

But nobody had and now nobody ever will and they’re just two dead kids in the middle of the wreckage of everything Jason has ever fucked up and he can’t  _ breathe _ , all he can think about is how  _ he _ had been the one to set the bomb, all he can think about is the fact that another kid is dead at the Joker’s hand and if he’d done something about it– if he’d gotten  _ Bruce _ to do something about it– 

Here’s a secret, something Jason has only admitted once, in the dead of night, when Roy held him after another nightmare had woken him screaming: he never wanted to be the one to kill the Joker.

Or, well, he  _ did _ , he wanted that fucker dead and he was willing to get his hands dirty if the opportunity arose, but– 

Jason’s killed a lot of people. Without hesitation. But when it comes to the Joker, he hesitates. It’s hard to admit he’s scared, but he _is_ , he’s so _goddamned_ _terrified_ because the bastard had _murdered him_ , and despite what you may infer from the fact that Jason is undeniably alive these days, _being murdered_ is not an easy thing to come back from. 

So, no, Jason doesn’t want to kill the Joker. He doesn’t even want to be  _ near _ the Joker. Every time he is, he freezes, unable to act for the phantom pain of a crowbar-crack and the hallucinatory laughter ringing in his head, the trapped memory of a moment he never left. When he sees the Joker he is fifteen again, dying again, and he can’t– he doesn’t  _ want _ to. Doesn’t want to be fifteen again. Doesn’t want to die again. Especially not like that.

Even that first time, when he’d had the Joker at his mercy and put the gun in Bruce’s hands, he hadn’t wanted to shoot the joker. He’d threatened and he’d postured but he hadn’t  _ meant _ it. Only the Pit’s anger, green and blinding, had prevented him from panicking in that moment, but even then, he’d come closer to shooting Bruce than he had to killing the Joker.

Bruce had known it, too. That’s why he’d turned away.

That’s why he’d thrown the batarang. He’d  _ heard _ the hitch in Jason’s voice, known that the barrel of the gun was aimed straight at his back, and acted in self-defence. 

The whole thing with the Joker– it had never been about vengeance. It had been about wanting to feel safe. Because Jason had known that he’d never rest easy in a world in which the Joker still breathed.

The Joker’s still breathing, right now. His daughter is not.

Jason wishes that he’d had the courage to pull that trigger years ago.

Voices. He can hear voices. They’re far away and fuzzy and it takes him a moment to pull himself out of his memories enough to comprehend the words.

_ “–need help!” _

_ “Batgirl?” _

He listens to the rest of the conversation, quiet determination brewing within him. 

The Joker is at a children’s hospital with yet another bomb. 

Jason isn’t going to let him blow up any more kids. 

He looks down at the girl in his arms. Remembers the way she’d smiled, mouth stretched wide and eyes dancing with a mania that characterised most of her movements. Remembered the way she’d smiled when she was being  _ genuine _ , the softness around her eyes, with a faint air of disbelief like she couldn’t believe that she had reason to really smile. 

It had only been about a month, between Duela joining them and her eventual betrayal, but they’d been a good few weeks. She’d been going to therapy. He and Roy had constructed her a bedroom in their warehouse, and gone shopping with her for furniture and decorations so that she could have a space that was truly her own. Jason had even bought her that  _ stupid _ Joker poster, because they sell things like that in California, where the Joker is just a horror story from the other side of the country and a symbol of edgy, alternate, emo teen culture, instead of a living nightmare responsible for the destruction of hundreds, if not thousands, of lives. 

Duela had laughed. She’d played terrible music. She’d been curious about Roy’s inventions, and helped him out in his workshop several times. Jason had started teaching her to cook, and she’d almost burned down their kitchen attempting to bake cookies while he wasn’t home. She had let them take her out for ice cream, and then joined in on their debate about which flavours were superior. She hadn’t been a normal kid, because she  _ couldn’t _ have been, but she’d been happy. She’d come to them for help after she’d woken screaming from nightmares, she’d opened up about her time in the sewers, one time she’d even begged Jason to take her somewhere where she couldn’t hurt anyone so that she could have a break down without damaging everything she’d built.

She hadn’t been stable, or sane. She’d been a long way from anything resembling  _ good _ . But she’d been better, and she’d been trying.

She’d been alive.  _ She’s not alive any more.  _

“I…” He chokes on the word. His mouth feels like sandpaper. “I let you down, Duela.” He lays her down on the rubble. She doesn’t stir, though part of him, the part of him that’s been too busy screaming to truly register everything that’s happening, half expects her to. “I can’t fail them, too.”

He stands, looks down at the girl he’d tried and failed to save, lying in the ruins of a building that had once been part of Bruce’s plan to save Jason. And he hates emphasising with Bruce, hates feeling like he understands that mentor-father-bastard, but he has to wonder, is this how Bruce had felt, when he’d pulled Jason out of the wreckage of that warehouse? Had he held Jason close to his chest, regretted every decision he’d ever made? Did he too struggle to tell apart the shattered remains of the building and the shattered remains of his heart, indistinguishable in his grief?

_ Had Bruce really loved him, after all? _

Jason hadn’t realised he’d loved Duela, but then again, Jason had a habit of burying his feelings for people. If he didn’t realise that he loved them, it couldn’t hurt him when they inevitably left.  _~~ It did. It always did. And he was always left standing in the aftermath, wishing he’d done something about it when they were still around to listen.  ~~ _

~~_ Maybe he’s got more in common with the old man than he’d like to think. _ ~~

“Sleep well,” he tells Duela, like he’d told her every night when she’d been staying with them, and turns his back on her for the final time. As he walks away, he pulls out a gun and switches out the rubber bullets.

No more hesitating. No more dead kids.

Jason’s got a clown to kill. 

**Author's Note:**

> the stuff i mentioned about duela staying with jason and roy (other than the fact that she did stay with them for a while) isn't canon, and i'm not sure how long she canonically spent with them before her betrayal? but it was long enough that they'd gotten her enrolled in a school, so probably a while, i figured.
> 
> jason not wanting to kill the joker and being about to shoot bruce is my own interpretation of the end of utrh-- i don't remember if it's the case in the comic, but in the movie version at least, jason is pointing the gun at bruce as he talks about killing the joker, which. idk. i feel like jason says a lot of things he doesn't mean, and he's very much an actions-speak-louder-than-words sort of person. 
> 
> elaboration! extrapolation! this is how we interpret and headcanon.
> 
> if you wanna hear more of my thoughts on any of this (and more!) hmu on tumblr @bullyingbatman


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